Path planning and dynamic control of a redundant robot manipulator for conveyor tracking

A redundant robot for specific application to conveyor tracking and obstacle avoidance is considered in this paper. This paper also presents an optimal path planning approach to minimize the cost of moving a redundant robot manipulator along a specified geometric path subject to angular velocity constraints. A sliding controller is introduced to improve performance. The proposed path planning approach using the forward kinematics and the perturbation method can be applied to solve the motion-planning problem with task priority requirements, such as obstacle avoidance. As opposed to the conventional approach, the Jacobian matrix is not used in the proposed method. The solution is obtained according to the design objective using an optimization procedure.